Conclusion from Yesterday

Yesterday was a fateful day for the Jewish people. I will try to explain exactly what happened and what it means from a narrow political, as well as a more global/Jewish perspective. I will give my general predictions for the near future (though I am not a prophet) and sum up with what me must do to prepare.

Personally, yesterday was touching, even incredible. Shmuel Sackett, the movement's fundraiser, and I sat at the entrance to the polling station all day. We spoke to our opponents the whole time about Jewish issues and we really became friends with them. There were no scuffles or name-calling, (except one incident where one guy called Shmuel a "behema") and the people that feared us for being bearded "right wing extremists" by the end of the day became our friends.

All in all, I am not depressed. I feel so privileged to be part of this fight, and I feel so happy to have met the people I have met along the way. It has really been the greatest experience of my life.

I am aware that you may not understand everything I will write in this email. I cannot explain everything perfectly and bring you directly inside my head. I will try my best though, and through it all, understand that I am not preaching doom. The Jewish people are never doomed. I am simply advising you all to be mentally prepared for a difficult period in our continuing history. How difficult, I cannot exactly say. In the end we will get through it. I just don't know when.

To get a more direct experience of what I am talking about, watch this video. Even if you don't understand Hebrew, watch the man's face at the end.

Political Analysis

As for the administration of it, the vote itself was conducted without observers from both sides, and for the first time in the history of Democracy, with actual moving polling stations on cars, driving up to people's houses, so Netanyahu's people could actually drive a polling station to a member they knew supported them, while avoiding the house of an opponent. But that aside, let's move on.

Yesterday's vote, from a narrow political perspective, means the death of the Likud party as a major political force in Israel. The Likud Central Committee, which sets Likud policy, voted to postpone internal elections for the party's institutions. The vote was technically over an amendment to the party constitution to require elections 3 years after general elections, instead of 1 year after them. Due to the fact that since 1973 there has never been a period of three years between general elections, the practical meaning is that the existing heads of the Likud Party's institutions are now holding their seats permanently, literally, until death do they part.

This means no one can get elected to anything within the party and the institutions become meaningless, people stop joining the party, chapters stop running, and the entire party infrastructure collapses. The Likud Party is no longer a group of Israelis trying to determine their destiny, because elections will no longer happen. Likud is now one thing: Benjamin Netanyahu. Since Netanyahu is not a very likeable or strong person, the Likud will cease to be a serious political party whenever the next elections take place.

But none of this really matters. The Likud Party is not "holy." It is simply a vessel with which to determine one's political destiny. Now that that vessel is dead, either someone else will have to lead it and rebuild it and reintroduce democracy within it, or otherwise a new vessel will have to arise in the vacuum that has now been created. All in all, these matters are only technical. They are ephemeral and unimportant. What really matters is what it will cause.

Global Analysis
Now that Netanyahu has absolute power within his party, there is nothing stopping him from pursuing his dream. His dream is not evil or sinister, and Netanyahu is not an evil person. His dream is simply for Israel to be a normal country, accepted and legitimate in the eyes of the Nations of the world. The problem is, this dream is unattainable and unrealistic, because since the founding of the Jewish people, they have never in their history been ordinary and accepted. Only once in their history were they accepted, and that was when they were extraordinary and accepted, in the time of King Solomon, when the nations of the world came to hear of his wisdom and real, true alliances were built and the nations of the world gathered at the Temple Mount to marvel at the social wonder that was the nation of Israel.

Netanyahu's dream can never be realized, and it doesn't take a history buff to figure that out. What we must understand though, is that this dream is the root cause of anti Semitism throughout history. Anti semitism, as a global phenomenon, is not simply your standard hatred for minorities. In isolated cases it may be. But in a pan-historical perspective, a Jew trying to be normal drives the nations maddeningly crazy, manifesting itself in varying degrees of violence throughout the centuries. It drives them crazy simply because they know as well as we know that we are an eternal people that testifies to the existence of God. The fact that we are God's people doesn't in itself engender jealousy and hatred. What does, though, is when God's people try to be just like everyone else.

Netanyahu is of course conflicted between his Jewish identity and his desire to be normal. This translates into an enormous sense of confusion and dilly-dallying. On the one hand, he does contain within him the dream of being extraordinary and accepted - the dream I call the classical Jewish "messianic" dream - and therefore deep down he wants Israel to be a moral powerhouse and technological wonder and all that, which will serve as a testimony to the world of...of...

And that is where Netanyahu gets stuck just like every single other Prime Minister of Israel got stuck, because he's not sure of what, since he does not believe in God. At least not enough to use his belief in God as a justification for anything he does as the leader of the Jews. That's why he turns to his second, more tepid dream of just being normal.

This conflict translates on the ground into Netanyahu's "political maneuvering" for time and "foot dragging" on the "peace process". He wants to be proud and Jewish and does not want to disconnect from the land of his ancestors, but since there's nothing substantive to back up this desire of his except for some vague emotion he can't quite place, in the end he will have to, because America wants him to give it up, and Netanyahu, first and foremost, wants to be normal and accepted. That dream, he can pin to something concrete: physical reality, which he, of course, does indeed believe in.

What is going to happen now is Netanyahu is going to try as hard as he can to do absolutely nothing, until such a point in time as he can no longer do nothing without risking the loss of international legitimacy, i.e. normalcy and acceptance. This point in time will be September, when the building freeze is up and he has to decide what to do. The pressure to give it all up in return for international legitimacy will be relentless, and since he, practically speaking, has no God, he will give in, just like every other Israeli leader has done since 1967.

When he does, he will frame it as if he is saving Israel. He'll say something like, "The Iranian threat is too serious, and we must come to a peace deal now in order to build an international coalition that will deal with the nuclear threat." He will thereby justify the move to himself as well, and genuinely believe he is doing the best for his people.

If he is successful in fooling Israel into believing this, it will happen. There will be no political force to stop him, since no such force exists anymore. If he succeeds, Netanyahu will have achieved the exact opposite of his dream. The world, seeing that the Jews are willing to leave their holiest sites under international supervision (which, of course, will be part of any deal) will  interpret subconsciously from this that the Jews don't really believe that they are God's people. This will cause ravenous amounts of global anti-Semitism, international delegitimization the likes of which will make what's going on today look like a joke, hundreds will die in terrorist attacks, and the world will abandon Israel to Iran anyway.

The only force that can stop Netanyahu now is not political. The Jewish people as a whole also have the same internal battle as Netanyahu. Namely, between their Jewish identities connecting them to God and their desire to shed them and be normal. If we wake up as a people and refuse to be fooled, perhaps the situation can be reversed, if that national waking-up translates to a rebellion in the Knesset and a refusal to carry out Netanyahu's will.

I fear, though, that I was naive in thinking that anything short of losing Jerusalem and seeing the consequences of this would wake up the nation, that we could just save everything before anything disastrous that would deeply shake the nation would happen, that we could spare Israel a serious existential debate. Though, either way, in the end we will wake up, for we are a nation that must always dwell alone. 

That being so, Israel has a very dark period ahead, and diaspora Jewry will feel it as well. I do not know how long it will last. I can only pray that we will weather the storm quickly and rise from the darkness that is now gathering ahead.

God bless you all, and good shabbos,

Rafi